Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns

painting by brother Boko depicting the assassination of Carl B. Hampton (People’s Party II / Black Panther Party) on July 26, 1970 in Houston, TX. dedication: “Best wishes, to sister Jackie. Boko / 2013”

WOW wind weeee

i cant count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n maim the language that i waz taught to hate myself in/ the language that perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/ she learns to speak of the world & the “self.” yes/ being an afro-american writer is something to be self-conscious abt/ & yes/ in order to think n communicate the thoughts n feelings i want to think n communicate/ i haveta fix my tool to my needs/ i have to take it apart to the bone/ so that the malignancies/ fall away/ leaving us space to literally create our own image.

— Ntozake Shange, “Unrecovered Losses”

with gianna love

windy

with my kind. roswell, NM

One of the things that does seem relatively new to me is the extent of the political resignation, by which I mean the lack of imagination, of people in general. The understanding that the social forces of domination are so large now that it’s just impossible to imagine life differently, either life without capital, or life without the domination of the US military and any number of things that seem so fixed. Part of the positive political effects of the kind of scholarship we’re engaged with is the stimulation of the imagination and a recognition that the world could be different.

It’s a lovely thing in Spinoza, how he says that prophets have no shortcut to the truth they just have much more powerful imaginations than the rest of us. Such statements were read as heretical, but he means it in the nice way. He’s all for the prophets. He didn’t mean to deflate them. It’s a really important thing that they have much more imagination than the rest of us. The imagination is constitutive, and I think this is true of how you, Lauren, use fantasy too. It’s not just unworldly, detached from the world spinning off the refusal of things, rather it’s constitutive in the sense that the imagination becomes so intense and embedded that it becomes real through its intensification and articulation. That puts theory in the realm of prophecy, but not prophecy in the realm of saying what’s going to happen. Instead, it’s the fostering of the imagination, the encouraging of that power to recognize that life can be, and in some ways already is, different.

— Michael Hardt, “On the Risk of a New Relationality:” An Interview with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt

Assata Shakur in Her Own Words: Rare Recording of Activist Named to FBI Most Wanted Terrorists List →

The FBI has added the former Black Panther Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorists list 40 years after the killing for which she was convicted. Born Joanne Chesimard, Shakur was found guilty of shooting dead a New Jersey state trooper during a gunfight in 1973. Shakur has long proclaimed her innocence and accused federal authorities of political persecution. She escaped from prison in 1979 and received political asylum in Cuba. On Thursday, she became the first woman added to the FBI’s terrorist list, and the reward for her capture was doubled to $2 million. We begin our coverage by airing Shakur’s reading of an open letter she wrote to Pope John Paul II during his trip to Cuba in 1998 after the FBI asked him to urge her extradition. “As a result of being targeted by [the FBI program] COINTELPRO, I was faced with the threat of prison, underground, exile or death,” Shakur said at the time. “I am not the first, nor the last, person to be victimized by the New Jersey system of ‘justice.’ The New Jersey State Police are infamous for their racism and brutality.”

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HANDS OFF ASSATA

hi from Denny’s.

if you are near Waterloo, Ontario—i’ll be giving a keynote talk on Sunday at the conference (En)gendering Resistance: Exploring the Possibilities of Gender, Resistance and Militancy. here is the link. it will be hosted at the University of Waterloo.

<3

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

— Susan Sontag, “Simone Weil”

i’ve been biking around listening to this Meas Samon song on repeat. (it’s too bad the rip on youtube is terrible.)